Friday, August 28, 2009

Our Homeschooling Day

This week, participants were asked to post a link to a post about a day in the life of their homeschool, so here's mine.

7:00 a.m. : My alarm goes off. I get up before anyone else, because this is my chance to make coffee and work on my blog in peace. DH sleeps later because he stays up late working on stuff for school ( last night it was planning a lesson for the Intro. to Anthropology class he's teaching today).

9:00 a.m. : A boy and his bee:

Yesterday, Blaze found an inflatable bee that I bought at the Dollar Tree ages ago, thinking it would be a good prop if we did a unit on insects someday. He was really excited and wanted it blown up right away so he could play with it in the bathtub. Then he insisted on sleeping with it.

So, anyway, at 9:00 I wake Blaze up. I've been reading to him a little each morning as a way of gently starting our day. This morning I read On Beyond Bugs, because Bee wants to hear a story too.

Blaze gets dressed while I fold some laundry that I brought back from the laundry room late last night. Then we play Easy Sight Word Bingo while munching on a bowl of dry MultiGrain Cheerios.

This is the only day this week that we haven't gone outside to play on the swings on the other side of the apartment complex right after getting dressed ( the swings closest to our building are blocked off, because they are in the middle of the construction chaos). Swinging before sitting down to work, helps Blaze focus better and feel calm. We didn't go out because the construction seemed louder and more chaotic that usual and twice we had people knocking on our door because they were trying to see who was still without phone or cable connections (we now have cable, just no phone).

Blaze's occupational therapist has suggested that he needs to continue working on his handwriting, so he works independently on a handwriting page, while I take a shower.

After my shower, Blaze asks to be brushed (we had started therapeutic brushing with him a year ago because of his sensory integration issues) and then we work together on the last 2 pages of Unit One of the Spectrum Dolch Sight Word Activities book (volume 1).

Blaze then has free time until 11:15, when we have to drive DH to school. After we drop him off at the university, there are a couple errands to run. We go to our storage locker to pack away all the camping gear and pay for another month of rental, go to Macy's to exchange a broken coffee grinder for one that works, and go out for lunch (fish tacos).

We had taken bread with us, because we planned to go feed ducks in the pond near our storage locker, but it started raining.

When we get home, Blaze does his math on the adult bed ( we live in a very small apartment and the adult bed is often our classroom).

Blaze then lays down to listen to me reread the story of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. This was the third time this week I had read this story. He had started working on a Main Lesson Book page for the story yesterday, but hadn't finished it, so he works on that now and as soon as that is done, I declare our first week back to homeschooling complete and we celebrate with a bowl of ice cream.

This week went pretty smoothly. The only rough day was Tuesday, but that's not bad when we are just getting back into the swing of things after Summer break.